Being Esther by Miriam Karmel

purpose. The longer she stares at them, the more they mock her with their specificity. They know what they’re about. They aren’t sitting around, conjuring the few taglines that might explain the meaning of their existence.

E sther looks forward to Tuesdays, the day she and Lorraine go to the community center for “Brown Bag Journaling.”
    She supposes the class is scheduled at the noon hour to give busy people the opportunity to sandwich one more activity into their day. But the idea of eating and writing at the same time doesn’t appeal to her. Multitasking, they call it; Esther calls it rude. It used to be you’d pay to see someone eating fire while walking a tightrope. Now people walk or drive or stand in the checkout line at the Jewel while talking on the phone, checking e-mail, or plugging music into their ears. They text messages while shifting lanes on the Edens Expressway. The other day, Sophie kept checking her cell phone while she and Esther were having tea.
    The truth is Esther manages to arrange her activities sequentially and still have time to spare. Yet the irony is how quickly time is running out.
    The class was Lorraine’s idea. At first, Esther resisted, declaring, “I’m not a writer.”
    â€œYou’ll learn,” Lorraine countered.
    Dubiously, Esther shook her head. She’s never kept a diary. She’s never even been surveyed to state her choice in a presidential race (unconditional Democrat), or to say whether or not she favors riverboat gambling (she does not), or whether she believes in global warming (as if that were a matter of faith). Until five years ago, Esther had been Marty’s wife. Now she is a widow.
    â€œI’m too old to learn,” Esther said.
    â€œIt’s therapeutic,” Lorraine insisted.
    â€œSays who?” Esther asked with annoyance. “Dr. Phil?”
    Since Lorraine retired as a legal secretary she’s become an aficionado of daytime TV. Oprah. Judge Judy. She quotes them all. After Marty died, she gave Esther a notebook. “It’s to write down your feelings,” she said.
    Though Esther isn’t convinced of the remedial powers of writing, she agreed to the journaling class when Lorraine said, “If you don’t get out more, that daughter of yours is going to put you in assisted living. You’ll be playing bingo instead of writing stories.”
    Now Esther finds herself seated in a classroom that was last decorated by a teacher who’d taken Black History Month to heart. Fraying pictures of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are taped to the cinder-block wall. A faded copy of the “Dream” speech is tacked to a crumbling bulletin board. The students are gathered around a large round table, with the teacher, a young thing Esther mistook for another student on the first day, democratically positioned in their midst. She is instructing them to close their eyes. “You’re six years old,” she says, her voice soft, hypnotic. “You’re in your mother’s kitchen. What do you see?” She wants details. Smells. Colors. Sounds. Every little knickknack.
    When Esther closes her eyes all she can see is the tattoo on the teacher’s wrist, the severe eyeglasses that mask a pretty face. She must be Sophie’s age, twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight. I dare you to try this when you’re eighty-five, Esther wants to say. Try conjuring a kitchen you haven’t thought about in decades.
    Then out of nowhere, a faded yellow linoleum floor appears, along with a round oak table and four mismatched chairs. Her mother is on hands and knees scrubbing the floor. The roomsmells of coffee and Spic and Span. Then Esther sees a pink cut-glass bowl filled with fruit. Her father is sitting at the kitchen table after dinner sipping hot tea from a tall glass and peeling the skin off an apple with a pearl-handled knife. The peel falls away in one long, continuous